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Das Kapital reading group, Week 17, April 22-28. From Vol. 1, we are reading Chapter 32, Chapter 33, Appendix I, and Appendix II (hexbear.net)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I'm back on top of the managing this now: no more midweek posting: readings will be posted Sundays ready for the week.

We are almost finished Volume 1. You could even skip the appendices if you want. The 33% of the three volumes completed corresponds to the way we're about 33% of the way through the year.

Explain the bookclub: We are reading Volumes 1, 2, and 3 in one year and discussing it in weekly threads. (Volume IV, often published under the title Theories of Surplus Value, will not be included in this particular reading club, but comrades are encouraged to do other solo and collaborative reading.) This bookclub will repeat yearly. The three volumes in a year works out to about 6½ pages a day for a year, 46⅔ pages a week.

I'll post the readings at the start of each week and @mention anybody interested. Let me know if you want to be added or removed.

Just joining us? You can use the archives below to help you reading up to where the group is. There is another reading group on a different schedule at https://lemmygrad.ml/c/genzhou (federated at [email protected] ) which may fit your schedule better. The idea is for the bookclub to repeat annually, so there's always next year.

Archives: Week 1 – Week 2 – Week 3 – Week 4 – Week 5 – Week 6 – Week 7 – Week 8 – Week 9 – Week 10 – Week 11 – Week 12 – Week 13 – Week 14 – Week 15 – [Week 16](https://hexbear.net/post/2338512]

Week 17, April 22-28. From Vol. 1, we are reading Chapter 32, Chapter 33, Appendix I (Commodities as the Product of Capital), and Appendix II (Capitalist Production as the Production of Surplus-Value)

Discuss the week's reading in the comments.

Use any translation/edition you like. Marxists.org has the Moore and Aveling translation in various file formats including epub and PDF: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/

Ben Fowkes translation, PDF: http://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=9C4A100BD61BB2DB9BE26773E4DBC5D

AernaLingus says: I noticed that the linked copy of the Fowkes translation doesn't have bookmarks, so I took the liberty of adding them myself. You can either download my version with the bookmarks added, or if you're a bit paranoid (can't blame ya) and don't mind some light command line work you can use the same simple script that I did with my formatted plaintext bookmarks to take the PDF from libgen and add the bookmarks yourself.

Audiobook of Ben Fowkes translation, American accent, male, links are to alternative invidious instances: 1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7 – 8 – 9

Resources

(These are not expected reading, these are here to help you if you so choose)

Harvey's guide to reading it: https://www.davidharvey.org/media/Intro_A_Companion_to_Marxs_Capital.pdf
A University of Warwick guide to reading it: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/postgraduate/masters/modules/worldlitworldsystems/hotr.marxs_capital.untilp72.pdf
Engels' Synopsis of Capital or PDF
Reading Capital with Comrades: A Liberation School podcast series - https://www.liberationschool.org/reading-capital-with-comrades-podcast/

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (2 children)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

party-blob to vol 1 being read!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

pineapple-stroll Let's end this.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (2 children)

So I haven't gotten all through the appendices yet, but my take on volume I is that it's uniquely organized book of truly revolutionary ideas. As a book to attempt to read sequentially, it was a challenge, and I honestly wouldn't have made it through without a weekly reminder, a discussion group, and the ability to listen to several chapters on a long road trip. I think it's place is better as neither a work of pure economics or of pure history, but a set of chapters each about a civilizational concept.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

it's place is better as neither a work of pure economics or of pure history

Agree. Marx(ism) rejects that these can be theoretically separated. Vulgar economy wants to reject the historical character of economics because it is always in the ruling class's interest to do so.

As well, the hyper-specialization of academia follows from the increasing specialization of the division of labor in capitalist society.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

I honestly wouldn't have made it through without a weekly reminder, a discussion group

We didit Reddit!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I really liked Marx bringing in more of that dialectical materialism at the end of chapter 32? this part. Along with the appendix to.

The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisition of the capitalist era: i.e., on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.

The transformation of scattered private property, arising from individual labour, into capitalist private property is, naturally, a process, incomparably more protracted, violent, and difficult, than the transformation of capitalistic private property, already practically resting on socialised production, into socialised property. In the former case, we had the expropriation of the mass of the people by a few usurpers; in the latter, we have the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

I also noticed him bringing back the "negation of negation" line, since you mentioned the Spinoza thing a couple threads back.

I'd like to understand more about the sense in which Marx invokes this line, because it doesn't seem like a perfect correspondence to me.

I understood Spinoza's "negation of negation" as a statement about ontology — what defines Thing A and differentiates it from Thing B.

I have a knowledge gap on Hegel's connection to this line, but I think Hegel's system is basically structured on negation of negation, being the mechanism by which sublation works to resolve (Hegelian) contradiction.

Since Marx seems to have been primarily a Hegelian rather than a Spinozist, I think Marx would have drawn his understanding of "negation of negation" in the sense understood by Hegel, not necessarily that by Spinoza. So if for Hegel, "negation of negation" is the mechanism by which dialectical concepts evolve, then for Marx, it is the mechanism by which dialectical material things evolve, e.g. society. It makes sense when taken in this sequence of thought, but looking back it seems odd to have wandered so far from Spinoza's original meaning.

Just thinking out loud really. If you or someone else has ideas about this I'd be curious owl-wink

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Just going to think outloud too since I'm way out of my expertise (and could be completely missing the point).

I think it's interesting that, by thinking the process as negation of negation instead of just negation, period, we force ourselves to think of phenomena as a continuum - instead of "this came from that", it makes we think "this came from that and is going to become something else through the continuation of the proccess being studied." In the Marx quote above, he doesn't stop at having capitalism negate individual private property, which would present the system to reader as the end point of the historical process, instead he goes on to show how capitalism gets negated by the same process and develops into the next thing.

It provides a dynamic point of view that forces you to consider how changes will accumulate over time and shift the whole thing around an axis of sorts. Reminds me of Wang Huning (I think?) writing about how the dollar hegemony may have put America at the top, but it's also the very same process of it's deindustrialization.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

In the discussion about Britain manufacturing a working class in America, in which Britain put an artificially high price on land in order to force laborers to work some minimum number of years before acquiring enough money to buy their own means of subsistence — this reminded me too much of mortgages, student loans, auto loans, medical debt, etc. which all serve to lock-in workers for a life of debt slavery.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

i'm so ready to begin on vol 2

marx-goth

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index-l.htm

The above link displays the full table of contents available on marxists.org for vol 1. The appendix is near the bottom. The prefaces, forewords, and afterwords, especially those by Marx and Engels, are worth reading too.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Where are the appendices? Neither of my versions of Volume 1 appear to have them. I found a version with an appendix on the value-form when I went searching but that's it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You can consider yourself finished if you want, I'm not your mom. They're in the Penguin edition tho.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

That's good to know they're in the penguin edition. Those appendixes are not in mine either. Except I did find like the value-form Doubledee mention. It was kind of nice looking over. But I read the wrong appendix.